\n<\/p>\n
Soon after Alex was born at 25 weeks, with multiple catastrophic disorders, Mary Jane\u2019s husband, unable to cope, fled their marriage. Still, she hopes he \u201cfinds some peace, I really do.\u201d<\/p>\n
She also thinks kindly of her boss, who means to accommodate her but pretty much fails to. \u201cIt\u2019s daily moral agony for her,\u201d Mary Jane marvels. \u201cIt\u2019s really something to behold.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mary Jane\u2019s own moral agony is likewise something to behold. She feels guilty about putting the super of her Queens building, where she shares a junior one-bedroom with Alex, in a difficult position by removing the window guards. \u201cIt\u2019s just that he loves looking out the windows, especially when he\u2019s sick and I can\u2019t take him outside?\u201d she explains in upspeak.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s the law,\u201d the not-unkind super replies \u2014 though Alex, now 2, can barely sit up, let alone reach the sill.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re an excellent superintendent,\u201d Mary Jane says. She is the embodiment of apologizing for living.<\/p>\n
That, at its heart, is the condition that Amy Herzog\u2019s steel-trap play \u201cMary Jane\u201d explores: The death of the self in the love for one\u2019s child. As with Alex, so for his mother: There is no cure.<\/p>\n
When it was produced in 2017 at New York Theater Workshop, I called \u201cMary Jane\u201d \u201ca heartbreaker for anyone human<\/a>.\u201d You did not need to be a parent, though it helped, to get dragged down by the undertow of terror beneath its placid, warm surface.<\/p>\n The Manhattan Theater Club production<\/a> that opened on Tuesday, starring the rom-dram charmer Rachel McAdams, confirms that earlier diagnosis. But Herzog<\/a>, whose Broadway adaptation of \u201cAn Enemy of the People\u201d<\/a> is running a few blocks away, is not interested in locking down meaning. Like all great plays, \u201cMary Jane\u201d catches light from different directions at different times, revealing different ideas. On the other side of the worst of Covid, \u201cMary Jane\u201d feels less like a parent\u2019s cry for more life<\/a> than an inquest into the meaning of death.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n I didn\u2019t notice that at first. The story spooled out, swiftly but subtly, along its original lines: a series of Mary Jane\u2019s often surprisingly funny interactions with eight women, four in each of the play\u2019s two parts. First, the super (Brenda Wehle) plunges the kitchen sink, making uncomfortable small talk about holistic therapies. (Mary Jane respectfully hears her out.) Next comes Sherry (April Matthis), the most reliable of the home nurses who help tend to Alex. Mary Jane displaces anxiety about changes in the boy\u2019s condition onto concern for Sherry\u2019s garden in wet weather.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Not that she is aware of how rigidly upbeat she seems; it\u2019s Herzog\u2019s technique that makes even the dullest conversation feel as sharp as a scalpel. Brianne (Susan Pourfar), a newbie to the world of adaptive strollers and insurance wrangling, is overcome by Mary Jane\u2019s glib you-can-do-it curriculum, in which caring for Alex (we never see him) sounds as easy as caring for his goldfish. And when Alex has a seizure while Sherry\u2019s niece Amelia (Lily Santiago) is visiting, Mary Jane calmly thanks the 911 operator. Twice.<\/p>\n As her life relocates to a neonatal intensive care unit in Part 2 \u2014 there is no intermission \u2014 the supporting actors return in new guises. Matthis is now a thoughtful but busy doctor, surprised by Mary Jane\u2019s continuing denial; Santiago a music therapist with a knack for arriving when Alex is asleep.<\/p>\n Two other women, a sharp-tongued Orthodox mother (Pourfar) and a robed Buddhist chaplain (Wehle), lead the play gently into a spiritual realm. For the mother, her daughter\u2019s illness is clarifying, the nearness of death becoming the only real thing in life. For the chaplain, it seems, there is nothing to do but face the suffering of both without rancor.<\/p>\n This turn toward questions of faith, and the way they finally breach Mary Jane\u2019s defenses, took me by surprise. I hadn\u2019t remembered the play that way, perhaps because I\u2019d seen it first through parental tears. Now, as its chorus of diverse women suggests, it seems to be about everyone\u2019s participation in loss.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n What has changed? Other than a brief allusion to the pandemic, little in the script. The shrewd staging, by Anne Kauffman, looks and sounds much the same, too. Lael Jellinek\u2019s set performs its wondrous midcourse transformation; Leah Gelpe\u2019s soundtrack of susurrations and beeps implies what the rest keeps hidden. New to the production, Brenda Abbandandolo delivers pinpoint costumes (the Orthodox mother\u2019s outfit is a triumph) and Ben Stanton makes marvelous images from streetlights, night lights and hospital fluorescents. The cast, returning or not, is unimprovable.<\/p>\n It\u2019s McAdams, with her fetching warmth,<\/a> who alters the temperature. If Carrie Coon\u2019s more businesslike approach in 2017 was also valid, the greater distance between McAdams\u2019s natural sunniness and Mary Jane\u2019s reality enhances the play\u2019s tension. It leaves you to wonder what Mary Jane was like before Alex\u2019s illness gave overwhelming purpose to her life \u2014 and, more painfully and permanently, what she will be like after it no longer does.<\/p>\n Mary Jane<\/strong>
Through June 2 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, Manhattan; manhattantheatreclub.com<\/a>. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n